


Not without its charms

by lilith_morgana



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 14:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18693424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: The castle is lonely without her, as though she is enough to fill it.Severus Snape and Charity Burbage through the teaching years at Hogwarts.





	Not without its charms

**Author's Note:**

> So this happens when you re-watch and re-read the HP verse and start thinking about friendship and these two.

__ 'Not without its charms is this terrible world,  
__ not without its mornings   
_ worth our waking. _   
**Reality demands - Wislawa Szymborska** ****  
  
  
__ “Severus, please, we’re friends.”   
**Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows**   
  


* * *

 

It begins as though they are predictable characters in a trite Muggle play: with tea.   
  
Several attempts at having it, in fact.   
  
  
  
  
The first time she’s still fresh from the outside, stumbling into the castle with no bang at all, without as much as a whimper. One morning she is just there by the table next to Severus who has grown used to the vacant seat over the summer and certainly at some point has even begun to hope it would remain that way. He turns his head and she’s _there_ , sharp edgy features and short messy hair that she keeps twisting her fingers into as she reads the Prophet. Everything about her is square somehow, a chunk of stone cut out from the wall.   
  
“This is... _tripe_ ,” she mutters and when he can’t help but look in her direction she shows him the article she’s referring to. A long winding text about the ‘beneficial long-term consequences’ of a ‘politically neutral commission to keep records of Muggle interference in the wizarding world’. “ _He_ hasn’t been gone for more than, what, twelve years and everyone has already forgotten. Politically neutral, bloody _hell_.”  
  
“Well, it _is_ the Prophet.” Severus reaches for a green muffin in the basket placed in front of them and breaks off a small chunk of it. His temples are already throbbing with the recent infusion of students, their shrill voices and inane bewilderments crawling their way under his skin unless he actively prevents it. _Ah to be young again_ , professor Sinistra had sighed last night, readying herself to go and break up a particularly rowdy crowd of giggling second-years. It remains one of life’s hardest lessons to learn that most adults have indeed had pasts that they can reminiscence fondly about. Youths full of rose-tinted memories that sustain them, remind them of who they are.   
  
He swallows, stares into the red tea where a few leaves rotate around themselves.   
  
Twelve years. No - eleven years, eleven months and four days. It still feels like he remembers every day that has passed since Godric’s Hollow. Like they rattle inside him, dance on the marrow of his bones.   
  
That surge of _shame_ at the image of Potter, dead. Gone forever, torn apart, silenced and buried. It had been such a comfort to him once - as he’d been repairing his destroyed textbooks, raising up his belongings from the bottom of the lake, covering up bruises and cuts and tears so that nobody would see just how pathetic Severus Snape was in case they had managed to miss it - to imagine that gruesome fate for his bullies. He’d conjure up fantastic deaths and intricate torture walking down to the dungeons to some kind of safety or up to the towers to the comfort of class. He’d repeat it at night while ignoring the more subtle taunts from Avery and Wilkes. A mantra at the back of his head: _one day, Potter, one day_. Now it’s nothing but a black bloody hole, a silenced scream somewhere inside him where he keeps the sensation of holding Lily’s body in his arms. The way his mind wobble - _jerks_   - back to that moment every time he must look at the son in his class or outside of it.   
  
Closing his mind, he returns to the present.   
  
“I’ve developed a fondness for Muggle newspaper over the summer,” Burbage says and lets the Prophet drop down on the table; the image of World Famous Auror Artemis Dorsey and her apprentices at the Ministry appear slightly offended. “They’re quite good at investigative journalism.”  
  
Severus nods. He does read them, too, if only to scan for signs of dark arts and stirring troubles - a habit he picked up from Albus very early on. Considerably ironic that the wizarding world teaches him about the Muggle one but there you have it. Speaks volumes about his own family. As far as he can remember his father never brought home any Muggle newspapers and if he had ever felt the need to imbibe any insights about the world beyond Spinner’s End he must have found them at the pub.   
  
“At times,” he agrees.   
  
The best ones certainly do tell a proper story from various angles - the worst ones, on the other hand, make the Daily Prophet’s gossip mongering pale in comparison. Even so, Severus skims them. With his own awareness of the smallest of hints, the unspoken ambiguities between the lines, he can interpret a lot from any ordinary Muggle paper. _Too_ much sometimes but then again Albus is overly relaxed in these matters and Severus needs to compensate. So he reads about football and war, typically ignoring the section where local geniuses complain about bumps in the road, immigration or rowdy teenagers and pretends he has not just wasted another ten minutes of his existence. It might prove useful eventually.   
  
He supposes a Muggle studies teacher has her own valid reasons.  
  
“They have delightful crosswords,” she adds with a conspiratorial smile in his direction. “You don’t happen to know a lot about Muggle literature, do you?”  
  
“What on earth makes you think that?” He waves at the pot to refill his cup. Some Slytherins led by five-year trouble-maker Levina Rookwood have begun to take their seats at a table near the entrance. To talk undisturbed, he assumes and makes a mental note. If it’s not a plot to thwart the Hufflepuffs at Quidditch this Saturday it’s likely some kind of forbidden expedition into the forest or any other lethal adventure. Did he, too,  _insist_ on placing himself in harm's way each day at school, he wonders at times.   
  
“Ah, just wishful thinking. I have a few blanks in the latest puzzle. Contemporary novels are blind spots for me, alas.” Her gaze travels across the room before returning to his face. “Those girls are trouble, I take it?”  
  
There’s that stitch in him even after all this time, that small twist of pain at the realisation that his House, his home at Hogwarts and the only place in the castle where he had felt remotely safe had been looked down upon. From the moment he spoke to the Sorting Hat in his head - _ah such scholarly passion, such a thirst for knowledge and yes power too -_ _not Ravenclaw, you say, I see, I see; you are prideful indeed, young man_ \- and sat down by the Slytherins he had known, vividly and in his heart, that everyone else had already made their mind up about him. Lily, too. That shift in her gaze, sometimes he thinks it had appeared already back then, that he lost her the moment they stepped into the castle.   
  
“They are cunning,” he says neutrally. “And filled to the brim with teenage hormones. Surely you are creative enough to come up with ideas for what they might be up to.”  
  
Burbage raises an eyebrow; she looks faintly amused. “One of them is in my class. Clever girl. Didn’t appreciate my lecture on the Muggle idea of magic and how it changed after the Statue of Secrecy.”   
  
He stifles a snort. “Shocking. Especially considering how riveting that topic sounds.”  
  
It does, actually, but he isn’t going to give her that.   
  
Before the breakfast is finished she invites him to have tea with her that afternoon. As a friendly gesture, she claims. Because they are both decades younger than most staff in the castle as though _youth_ would be one of his defining features, he who feels like he was born an old, charmless grump. Because she is new and he is not.   
  
Because, Severus thinks, like many others she still remembers him hanging upside down from a tree, naked and angry. Or recovering in the Hospital Wing. Or crawling back from the ground after taking a beating - _no wands, Snivellus, let’s see how you do without your precious magic!_ __  
  
He puts down his cup and pushes to his feet.  
  
“I can assure you, Miss Burbage, that I have absolutely no desire for a cup of anything. Or for your company for that matter.”  
  
“Pity.” She regards him calmly over the rim of her cup; her pale eyes look like fading shadows and faintly like something he remembers from long ago. A person, perhaps. Or a feeling. “I was hoping we could chat for a bit longer. You are by far the cleverest professor in this room.”  
  
He glances around, sneering as his gaze falls on Hagrid and Hooch, accompanied at their table by Binns who appears unusually boring even for Binns if the look on Hooch’s face is anything to go by.   
  
“That, however, isn’t saying much.”  
  
“Indeed.” A little twitch to the corners of her mouth now. She puts the cup down, softly. “But the statement would hold up even if the rest of them entered.”  
  
“This level of flattery indicates that you need my help with something, Miss Burbage.”   
  
Her facial expression gives nothing away - it impresses him slightly and he finds himself tempted to test her momentum further - but the corners of her mouth twitch. After a beat she looks up at him, folding her newspaper carefully in her hands and nodding towards it.   
  
“As I said, the crossword isn’t complete.”  
  
He waits a second - for what he is not entirely certain - before turning on his heel and leaving the Great Hall in quick strides.   
  


  
  
*   
  
  
  
The second attempt at tea fares even worse and she laughs at her mirror image afterwards.    
  
The third is observed by fellow professors and a few paintings. For days afterwards she can hear them whisper and giggle whenever she passes by.    
  
“Did you really ask Snape for tea?” Rolanda takes a seat beside her at supper and the question slips out before she’s even touched her food. “You have some nerve, Burbage. I do approve.”   


Everything is fixed within the castle - oddly so for a place run by an eccentric man like Albus Dumbledore - and Charity has not bothered to learn how everyone regards everyone else yet. She doubts she will ever give it much thought. That’s the Ravenclaw in her, she thinks now when she’s back here where everyone has their place, that quiet but powerful disregard for consensus.    
  
She remembers Severus Snape from her third year. He was a first-year then and already prone to ending up beaten and ridiculed in some secluded corner of the castle, conveniently out of sight. A student who likely would have been invisible if it hadn’t been for that entity of raw fury in him, spitting and kicking, fighting for its life, for  _ his  _ life even when he seemed to have given up on himself. Making him an even better target for a pack of Gryffindor boys. If there is one thing she  _ knows  _ in her bones it’s that Muggle schools at least acknowledge the power structures among children, the utter terrors they subject each other to.    
  
_ Boo-hoo little Scarity-crow, why do you always smell like a dog shat on you, eh?  _ Her parents had been told. There had been fruitless and tearful meetings. She had cried herself to sleep for four years straight. But hey had been  _ told _ .    
  
Wizards are different in ways she has spent a good part of her adult life trying to word in her own head. Perhaps it’s about competition, the notion that magic is as strong or as weak as the witch wielding it and that each comparison, every duel, is a battle of your  _ worth _ . Her Muggle mother who’d fail to understand why Charity had spent the summers buried in books and meticulous, obsessive hand-waving to force the movements into her body, her Gryffindor father pretending the wizarding world has a place for everyone because it’s always had a place for  _ him _ .    
  
Charity Burbage knows that’s bollocks. And she suspects Snape knows that, too.    
  
She  _ remembers  _ him. Overly lanky, overly studious, overly greedy for everything as though he had been nothing but an empty space swooping through the castle halls, craving it all. Outcasts recognize each other but she had also recognised that while she was an ugly, square-faced and smart-mouthed little half-breed who also happened to fancy girls, she had been brought up with love. Snape, desperate and hopeless, had not.    
  
As a boy, Charity thinks, he was a walking catastrophe.    
  
As a man he is perhaps not  _ entirely  _ improved (rather far from it) but he’s funny in a dark and bitter way, consistently reasonable and madly clever. The last part, in particular, is what makes it so necessary for them to drink a cup of bloody tea, trying to sort it out. Loyalties matter in the turmoil that follows a war, in the long aftermath when covers are blown and re-arranged. So she keeps sending the crossword in the Guardian to his quarters along with cheerful notes explaining what she would like him to help out with. He never mentions it when they run into each other, never returns the papers.    
  
Until he suddenly does.    
  
When she’s stalked him for half a term with the crossword puzzles he  _ finally  _ gives up, gives in, throws her Guardian on her desk and folds his arms across his chest. Standing like that with legs apart and his hard gaze pinning her to her chair, Charity gets a sudden glimpse at what the students must see down in the dungeons.  _ Efficient as he undoubtedly is, _ Minerva McGonagall mutters in her head,  _ he frightens the weak-hearted among them into blithering fools.  _ __   
__   
_ The same could be said of you, Minerva,  _ Albus had pointed out and Charity had smiled to herself.  __   
  
If Snape is enough to render them useless, she thinks as she rises from her chair and waves for the tray with tea cups to land on the small table by the window where she prefers to take her tea, then they need to better themselves anyway.    
  
“Square root,” he says and nods towards the newspaper. “What did it say: ‘A number  _ r  _ in relation to  _ p  _ such that _ r  _ multiplied by itself equals  _ p’.  _ That is, unless I am much mistaken and I rarely am, a square root.”    
  
Charity grins into her cupboard, conjuring up milk, sugar and a small plate of mint biscuits.    
  
“Brilliant. Math never did much for me back in primary school.” She gestures for him to take a seat in one of the armchairs and he does so, after a brief hesitation. If he’s surprised to learn of her Muggle upbringing, he shows no signs of it.    
  
“Am I dismissed?”    
  
“There’s tea.” The scent of warm bread and hot water, mingled with the butter and the minty sugar is enough to make her hungry but Snape doesn’t seem to submit very much to base needs like hunger. Even so, he glances at the serving platter she quickly produces. Cooking spells have always been her favourite tidbit of magic and she’s excellent at it. It’s a ridiculous thing to be proud of but she is, wants him to acknowledge it.    
  
Snape exhales. Something impatient finds its way into his voice as she sits down opposite him. “Why  _ am  _ I here, Miss Burbage? To swap heartwarming stories of our Muggle roots?”   
  
“Why, do you have any?” She simply cannot  _ help  _ herself around him. Everything he throws at her she wants to return - sending banter when he casts sarcasm, pleasantries to block his sour rigidness. It appears to upset his momentum a little bit, too, and she has never been able to resist  __ that .    
  
“No.”   
  
“Me neither.”   
  
She takes a bite of her biscuit and looks out at the groups of students still scattered across the school grounds, awaiting supper and study sessions at the library, perhaps. Or making up plans for whatever secretive business students are fond of these days. It seems to change quickly or always remain the same; she wouldn’t know, she spent seven years in some dusty tome under the approving glare from Pince who’d let her come and go as she pleased.    
  
Squaring her shoulders, she looks back at Snape who studies her openly now with that hard glint in his gaze. The things she hears about him, rumours and truths sticking to his thin frame like jinxes.    
  
“Do you need a reason?” she asks. “For being here?”   
  
Slowly he raises one of his eyebrows again - arches it in a rather masterful display of disbelief that she can certainly picture him doing in front of his students. He opens his mouth as though he is about to speak but remains silent.    
  
“Have a mint biscuit,” she offers and takes another one for herself.   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  


A school year passes; she stops writing to her mother, stops waiting for her mother to write to her. There’s a solitude to her life at Hogwarts that both agrees with her and terrifies her. One by one her connections to life outside the castle disappears and she is no longer certain she will fight for them.     
  
A school year passes; he survives it and so does Lily’s son although there are moments when Severus believes he will break his promise, that he will find the boy the way he once found her mother. Albus brushes away his concerns with a casual callousness that makes something inside his chest harden, darken in a terrifying way. Albus Dumbledore and his secrets. The way he closes around everything like a bloody stone protecting its heart, the unspoken things at its core. Their talks about the Dursleys and the Muggle-protected life of the boy who lived are always very brief and Severus can’t tell if it’s because Albus is reluctant to share the details with him due to a lack of trust or because he doubts Severus can endure them. Either way, it grates on him, a constant frustration at the bottom of his mind.    
  
He watches Burbage leave the day before he does; for a minute he has half a mind to ask her where she is going to spend her summer but he catches himself.   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
That summer she travels to  Arkhangelsk  to visit a woman she once loved. Clara who studies arithmancy and potions, who looks up only briefly from her self-made laboratory in an abandoned shack where it appears she’s currently residing.    
  
“I thought you hated the idea of teaching,” she says, her voice distant, as Charity tells her about her last few years, about Britain and everything that has happened to it.    
  
“I don’t think I’ve ever said that.”   
  
“Oh. Then it must have been someone else.”   
  
Russia lies between them: grey mountains and massive tundras, all the proud trees, magical bushes and fantastic beasts that have been harvested as ingredients to push Clara’s research forward. She stands there as a master of her art, a solitary figure against the harsh backdrop.    
  
Charity remembers them differently, remembers them entwined and at peace but perhaps they never were.    
  
She fills her bags with exquisite potions supplies and rare mixtures, finds a magical shop near her portkey and stocks up on textbooks, old maps and the kind of literature she’d never find in Diagon Alley. There are postcards on display near the exit and she hesitates mid-step, hoovering around them for a moment before deciding on buying three. One for her parents, one for Rolanda and the last one for Severus.    
  
After scribbling down brief messages and small tidbits on each card she puts them in her inner pocket and forgets about them until Christmas.     
  
  
  
*   
  
  
That summer he visits the Malfoy manor twice, reluctantly and terrifyingly sober among drunk Death Eaters and assorted purebloods. He attends these atrocities to test himself against others - Albus encourages it, often suggests it with that glint in his eyes that Severus secretly fears - and sips on a goblet of vintage wine while he’s listening to Lucius whinging about the Ministry or the decline of Hogwarts under Headmaster Dumbledore.    
  
“I shall leave my worst complaints until a more strategically sound occasion,” he says. Then a quick smile, an outstretched hand that mirrors the gregarious manners he considers himself to have. Lucius has never been in tune with how others perceive him and there are days when Severus envies that trait until he cannot breathe. It would make him an atrocious double agent but a happier man, for certain. “No need for you to worry, of course, Severus.”   
  
“I would think not,” he says and pretend-drinks another mouthful.    


Theirs is not a friendship to wax lyrically about but even so it _is_ a friendship. Or the best - _only_ \- illusion of one.  He nurtures it, quietly treasures it, while preparing himself for future betrayals.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
The first two weeks of the term before the students arrive - _that brief window of sanity_ , Severus scoffs in her memory, making her grin again now - she spends preparing her lessons and herself, slipping back into the professional role she’s assuming here. It’s already effortless.   
  
Even Clara is a distant memory, even now. One that requires mind-games and strategy but she cannot afford to be picky about these matters.   
  
This is a memory, too:   
  
“Ah, Charity,” Dumbledore says, back when they’re having eggnog by the candles in the Great Hall, enjoying the peace and quiet of a Hogwarts with most of the students away for the holidays. She has told him about Muggle education, how pedagogy is something you study at university, not just pull out of some dusty corner of your own mind. “I do approve of my own decision to hire you. You seem like the type of person who spots the best in everything.”  
  
She’s tipsy and finds it delightful for a change to be carefree and safe. She tilts her head back and laughs a little.   
  
“In Muggle culture, you mean?”  
  
“In people, perhaps.”  
  
“You mean Severus?”  
  
Dumbledore looks out over the room, glances sideways at her over the rim of his glasses. Textbook manipulator, she thinks but that notion, too, only seems slightly hilarious tonight. They are untouchable.   
  
Perhaps even Severus.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Charity knocks on his door the last night before the students are returning; when he opens he notices that she’s carrying a bottle of what appears to be home-made wine.   
  
He lets her in without a word.   
  
  



End file.
